Datalyst Blog

The dream of a company-only device policy died about five minutes after the first smartphone hit the market. Whether you officially allow it or not, your team is likely checking Slack from their sofas and answering emails in the grocery line on their personal phones.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is no longer a perk; it’s the standard. But without a solid strategy, it’s also a security nightmare waiting to happen. Here is how to embrace the flexibility of BYOD without handing the keys to your kingdom to every malware-laden app on the app store.

Wikipedia has always been the gold standard for human-vetted information. A recent clash between the Open Knowledge Association (OKA) and veteran Wikipedia editors has highlighted a big issue: AI hallucinations.

What started as an ambitious project to translate and expand the world’s most famous encyclopedia has turned into a cautionary tale about the erosion of AI trust.

AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot have moved from hype to expectation. SMB leaders now expect their teams to work faster and smarter with AI support — drafting content, extracting insights from meetings, and turning data into decisions. But whether Copilot delivers on that promise depends on something most businesses overlook.

You’ve seen the demos. Dashboards filled with green bars, heatmaps of employee activity, and productivity scores that promise to tell you exactly who is working and who is watching Netflix.

To you, it’s monitoring: A way to protect your assets and ensure you’re getting what you pay for. To your team, it’s spying: a digital leash that says, "I don’t trust you to do the job I hired you for."

In order for any modern business to be successful, it is crucial that everyone is on the same page…and in order for this to happen, a business needs to have the tools available to collaborate and communicate, internally and externally.

Let’s take a few minutes to go over what these tools look like nowadays to see if we can identify any gaps in your own resources that should be filled.

Quantifying the impact of AI on employment is notoriously difficult because technology rarely replaces a job in its entirety. Instead, it tends to disassemble a role into its component tasks. While AI is exceptionally efficient at handling repetitive, data-heavy, or predictable processes, it struggles with the high-level reasoning and interpersonal nuances that define many professions.

Is your business ready to grow as we head into 2026? You may have heard that data is what fuels the decisions that lead to growth, but without a focus on the right types of data, you could be floundering and playing catch-up. Today, we’re sharing three types of data that your business can use to dominate in 2026, as well as solutions to help you collect it.

Do you remember when you were able to Google something and get the answer immediately, and not have to scroll past ads, sponsored results, and a not-totally-reliable answer hallucinated by an AI? You aren’t the only one. This trend of gradually declining quality in the products and services we all rely on has a very specific, descriptive name that efficiently captures what is happening to tech while also making all our feelings about it exceptionally clear.

In 2022, technology critic and author Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification.” The term was named the Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society in 2023, even beating out “AI.” It has proved so resonant that its use has expanded beyond social media platforms to include hardware, software, and technology in general.

It’s easy to think of IT as a money sink. No matter how much you spend, there’s always some issue that surfaces, requiring a considerable investment on your part. But what if we told you that you don’t have to worry about IT issues?

With the right approach, you can transition from the traditional reactive method of IT maintenance to proactive IT solutions, designed to save you money.

Every so often, it helps to reflect for a moment on the purpose of your business, which is—with almost no exceptions—to deliver a good or service to your customers/clients. As such, every improvement you make to your technology should yield dividends for this base, even if the improvement is internal.

Let’s talk about how this might take shape and how we can help you facilitate it.

Let’s be honest for a second. You didn’t start your business because you love configuring firewalls or figuring out why the printer is offline for the third time this week. You started your business to do what you’re good at. Yet somewhere along the way, technology became a necessary evil—a constant source of friction that feels like it eats up your budget and your patience.

If you’ve ever wanted to throw your laptop out the window, you aren't alone. Here is why technology feels like such a headache, and why the problem isn’t you—it’s the approach.

You've heard the grumbling, seen the memes, and probably even felt it yourself: that vague, all-powerful entity known as the algorithm. It's blamed for everything from political polarization to your inexplicable obsession with people eating military rations. What exactly is it, and what digital giants are pulling its strings?

You invested in technology to support your business, spending time and money to acquire and implement it. What happens if that technology turns out to be a lemon… a high-priced item that’s ultimately a dud, or at the very least doesn’t mesh with your future plans?

This is often the result when tech is purchased to fix a short-term issue without a long-term strategy, and ultimately means that the purchaser loses money and productivity due to incompatibility issues. Alternatively, planning a strategic roadmap for your IT to follow helps ensure your investments actually advance your business’ future.

How much control do you really have over your IT assets? Oftentimes, businesses will consider other priorities, like sales, operations, and customer service, before they focus on IT systems and resources. The problem with this is that it creates a significant burden for your business, both in terms of the hidden financial drains and serious security vulnerabilities that undermine your business’ stability.

It’s a symbol that we’ve all become familiar with in recent years: three horizontal lines, representing the menu of whatever application or website is currently in use. Sometimes appearing as three dots, this little icon can be surprisingly important for both the end user and the business using it… especially now that mobile devices are so commonly used for browsing (early this year, 64% of all website traffic was observed to come from these devices).

Here's a horrifying thought: Imagine your beautiful office has 50 hardworking employees... but only one tiny, single-stall bathroom. It's chaos. There's a line down the hall, all day. Productivity grinds to a halt. It's a classic bottleneck, and it’s completely unnecessary.

Here's the hard truth: This is exactly what’s happening to your business’ data right now. You’re paying your ISP for a super-fast Internet connection, but you’re forcing all that crucial business data through a flimsy, $50 consumer-grade router; you’re going to find out it’s not up for the job.

Let me ask you something: how well does your current IT support function?

If your first instinct is to say something vaguely positive, like “good” or “fine,” you’re probably missing out on significant benefits that could come from a more immersive and fleshed-out service delivery, rather than a stopgap meant to preserve the status quo. If your provider has never asked you about the future and your goals for it, it may be time to seek what else is out there.

With the rise of generative AI infiltrating pretty much every sector of society, it’s no wonder that businesses are finding creative new ways to use it for their gain. However, you need to be especially careful when using generative AI in the workplace. Today, we want to cover three common no-no’s that your business should keep in mind as it navigates the wild landscape that is AI.

You’ve got a business to run, and the last thing you need is for your technology to throw a wrench in the works. You’ve entrusted your IT to a support provider, but lately, you’ve had a nagging feeling that things aren’t quite right. Are you just being paranoid, or is your IT support really failing your business?

Let’s cut to the chase and look at five warning signs that it might be time to find a new IT partner.

If your business has a Microsoft 365 subscription, you are likely using Outlook for email and Word for documents. However, if that's the extent of your usage, you're missing out on a significant portion of its capabilities.

Your subscription includes powerful applications that can improve teamwork, data collection, and overall efficiency across your entire operation. Let's explore them.